Clipstart: Your Personal Video Manager

The smartphone revolution has made it extremely simple to document our life, every step of the way. In a lot of ways, it’s a good thing. Thanks to the crystal clear lenses in our pockets, we can forever capture cherishable moments not only as pictures, but also as videos with impeccable resolution (at least compared to what we’d have used a decade ago).

Over these years, a ton of apps and services have come up to help people organize their digital media. Managing images has never been easier, and from Picasa to iPhoto, there are so many nifty apps to help deal with our mountain of images. But what about all the shaky, blurry and perhaps the randomgood enough videos? That’s what Clipstart is for.

Getting Started

Clipstart complements your photo application to give you a place that is designed for home movies. You can download a free trial of Clipstart from the developer’s home page. With the trial version, you are free to explore all the features of the app without any restrictions. But, you won’t be able to add tags to more than 20 videos or upload more than 2. For $29, you can remove all these limitations.

Importing to Clipstart Library

Clipstart doesn’t just stop with the mobile devices you connect to the Mac. At the outset, it’ll ask you to select the location from where you want the app to index videos from. Plugged in devices and CD ROMs are covered too. For those asking – there are two ways you can handle videos spread across the drives.

First you could just ask the app to index everything in the library and access them all in one place. Or, you could just direct the app to move the videos to central destination for better organization. If you go with the second choice, all copying happens in the background and you can continue to use the app without having to wait.

Importing Videos

It took Clipstart only a few seconds to go through my stuff in the hard disk and index all videos. However, it took sometime for the app to offer a thumbnail view of the videos though. A major point worth notice is the user interface, or the lack of it! There are no buttons, icons or flashy elements to speak of in the app.

Imported Videos

There’s just the left column that shows all the tags you have created and the right column which displays all your videos.

Companion Window

A companion window floats to the side and comes in handy to check out the history of uploads and the tasks you have performed. The library tab in this companion window is the place to look for if you want to locate the videos in the Mac.

To tag videos, just click on them and add away. The app makes it a piece of cake for you to add or copy tags in bulk and this process can be made faster by way of using the keyboard shortcuts.

Option to Change the Date

Though the name of the videos were retained, there is no way to see the metadata attached to them. Even right clicking on a video from the app offered only an option to change the date the video was taken and not a way see all its properties.

Trimming Videos

To either make them interesting or to save bandwidth, videos need a little nip and tuck before putting them on display. With Clipstart, you don’t have the hassle of working with another app to edit your videos. It isn’t Final Cut, but is good enough for a quick slice and dice!

Trimming a Video

If you have used the video editor in your iPhone, then you won’t need a crash course to get the job done. Move the mouse around to select the start and stop points in the video and that’s it! You can even quickly upload a trimmed portion of a movie without needing to save a new copy.

If need be, you can convert videos to H.264 right from the app too. At present, the app supports uploading videos to Flickr, Vimeo and YouTube.

Final Thoughts

The goal of Clipstart is simple enough. Solve the problems of folks who have a ton of videos in the mobile phones and hard disks and don’t know what to do with them. And, the app to a great extent succeeds in that vision, thanks to a clutter free user interface. Developers tend to go nuts with a ton of features and interface elements when it comes to an app like this.

The workflow couldn’t be simpler either – import, trim and upload! Clipstart is priced right too. For $29, the app is a steal and for sure will do a lot of heavy lifting if you own and upload lot of videos.